diff page 4 - Dave's Blog

Easy: Connect your RSS or Atom feed to Google Buzz

It was relatively easy, although still more difficult than I would have guessed, to hook my bespoke website's Atom feed up to Google Buzz. I already have a Google email account and associated profile so Buzz just showed up in my Gmail interface. Setting it up it offered to connect to my YouTube account or my Google Chat account but I didn't see an option to connect to an arbitrary RSS or Atom feed like I expected.

But of course hooking up an arbitrary Atom or RSS feed is documented. You hook it up in the same manner you claim a website as your own via the Google Profile (for some reason they want to ensure you own the feed connected to your Buzz account). You do this via Google's social graph API which uses XFN or FOAF. I used XFN by simply adding a link to my feed to my Google profile (And be sure to check the 'This is a profile page about me' which ensures that a rel="me" tag is added to the HTML on your profile. This is how XFN works.) And by adding a corresponding link in my feed back to my Google profile page with the following:

atom:link rel="me" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/david.risney"

So more difficult than I would have expected (more difficult than just an 'Add your feed' button and textbox) but not super difficult. And yet after reading this Buzz from DeWitt Clinton I feel better about opting-in to Google's Social API.

Encode-O-Matic Update: Compression, Hex View, Quick Show Output

I've just put up an update for Encode-O-Matic with the following improvements:

• Hex editor: the output and input views can now be switched between a UTF8 textbox view and a hex editor view. This is built using the free Be.HexEditor.
• Compression: I've added the .NET GZip, deflate, and inflate streams to the list of supported encodings.
• Quick Show Output: There are now 'Show Output' radio buttons next to each encoding in the encoding stack. Clicking on them changes the output view to show the output from that encoding in the stack. This lets you easily jump between different parts of your encoding process. Adding or removing an encoding to the stack resets the view.
• Minor visuals improvement: added app icon, changed buttons with one word symbols to command names.

WPAD Server Fiddler Extension

I've made a WPAD server Fiddler extension and in a fit of creativity I've named it: WPAD Server Fiddler Extension.

Of course you know about Fiddler, Eric's awesome HTTP debugger tool, the HTTP proxy that lets you inspect, visualize and modify the HTTP traffic that flows through it. And on the subject you've probably definitely heard of WPAD, the Web Proxy Auto Discovery protocol that allows web browsers like IE to use DHCP or DNS to automatically discover HTTP proxies on their network. While working on a particularly nasty WPAD bug towards the end of IE8 I really wished I had a way to see the WPAD requests and responses and modify PAC responses in Fiddler. Well the wishes of me of the past are now fulfilled by present day me as this Fiddler extension will respond to WPAD DHCP requests telling those clients (by default) that Fiddler is their proxy.

When I started working on this project I didn't really understand how DHCP worked especially with respect to WPAD. I won't bore you with my misconceptions: it works by having your one DHCP server on your network respond to regular DHCP requests as well as WPAD DHCP requests. And Windows I've found runs a DHCP client service (you can start/stop it via Start|Run|'services.msc', scroll to DHCP Client or via the command line with "net start/stop 'DHCP Client'") that caches DHCP server responses making it just slightly more difficult to test and debug my extension. If a Windows app uses the DHCP client APIs to ask for the WPAD option, this service will send out a DHCP request and take the first DHCP server response it gets. That means that if you're on a network with a DHCP server, my extension will be racing to respond to the client. If the DHCP server wins then the client ignores the WPAD response from my extension.

Various documents and tools I found useful while working on this:

• WPAD IETF draft document the never out of draft document describing WPAD
• DHCP RFC
• DHCP options RFC
• DHCP Wikipedia article which includes helpful byte layout tables for DHCP messages.
• Fiddler Wiki esp. the dev section but also the portion on the new preferences API.
• Fiddler Dev Docs and for those things not covered in the Fiddler docs, Visual Studio's name completion (or the .NET Reflector) usually served me well.
• Netmon a great network sniffing tool for all my non-HTTP network inspection needs.
• Tiny DHCP Server on CodeProject which implements a conventional DHCP server.

Thanksgiving 2009

Sarah and I had Thanksgiving dinner at our house the Sunday before. Sarah's parents and siblings came as well as my parents who came up for the a handful of days. It was our first time hosting Thanksgiving so I was a little nervous, but my parents helped us setup and get ready so of course it went well! I cheated a bit: I ordered a turkey online from Whole Foods where you can just tell them when you want to pick it up, they have it cooked and ready including garnish and you just need to warm it up. When we moved in together Sarah and I each had slightly different small dining room tables. Thankfully they're roughly the same height and width and we could put them together end to end and seat everybody with no room to spare. On actual Thanksgiving day we went over to Rachel & Anson's lovely new place for Thanksgiving and the annual game of Trivial Pursuit.